Shortly after the “confession” article by
William Bradford Huie appeared in the January 24, 1956 edition of Look
magazine, a series of articles began to appear in the Black newspaper, the
California Eagle. Although this series claims to unfold the truth
about the Emmett Till murder while differing drastically from Huie, the
articles received very little attention. I found that after scanning several of the newspapers
that had prominently featured the Till case and also commented on Huie’s
article, none mentioned the Eagle articles.

The California Eagle installments
were written by a journalist under the pseudonym Amos Dixon. An introductory
note in the first installment claimed that Dixon had not only covered the
trial, but he had “talked freely to those who knew what happened.” Unlike Huie, who had Milam and Bryant as his sources, Dixon maintained that there
were accomplices to the murder and names them. His account matches more
closely the testimonies of witnesses Willie Reed and Mandy Bradley, although
at the same time, there are some obvious errors of fact.

Mississippi doctor and civil rights leader
T. R. M. Howard was clearly behind the publication of these articles.
Historians David Beito and Linda Royster Beito, in their
biography of Howard called Black Maverick,provide evidence for this in that Howard and Eagle
publisher Loren Miller had been friends for over two decades. According to
the Beitos, Howard did aid the publishing of another investigative piece,
Time Bomb (also included on this website) which reached similar
conclusions to Dixon, and which appeared around the same time the Eagle
articles were published.

Dixon maintains that others, including two
other Milam brothers and three other black men were involved in the murder of
Emmett Till. These names had already been familiar to Howard and had
surfaced in the investigative articles by black reporter James Hicks (see
the link to Hick’s investigations on this site also). Despite some obvious
shortcomings, these articles have deserved greater attention and are an
important source that maintained early on that others were involved in the
murder of Emmett Till.